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Nominations for the Executive Committee and for auditors should be submitted to the Secretary at least 1 month before the General Meeting. The Secretary communicates nominations to the Association’s members immediately following the closing date for nominations and makes a full list of nominations available at the General Meeting

Please notice that we are calling nominations for all positions on the Executive Committee. Members of the current Executive Committee who may wish to stay on their positions will have to be nominated and – in case – re-elected to those positions.

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We would like to inform you of the outcome of the application process for travel grants to attend the XX IASPM Biennial Conference to be held in Canberra, 24-28th June 2019, which closed on 21st December 2018. We received 58 applications, which were then processed and ranked according to the criteria that we had announced.

The School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music at Dublin City University is a dynamic and creative learning and research environment with a strong commitment to social and cultural engagement, and world-class research. Applications for a full-time PhD scholarship are welcome in the areas of Musicology, Applied Musicology or Music Composition. The Scholarship provides fees plus a €16,000 stipend per annum for up to four years, subject to satisfactory annual progression. The Scholarship is open to IRE or UK students, EU students, and international students, who will be resident in Ireland for the duration of the degree.Continue reading →

Music and Artificial Intelligence: Pasts and Futures, Opportunities and Risks

May 28 2019, Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Aarhus University

Given escalating public concerns over the implications of Artificial Intelligence, this conference probes AI’s cultural implications through the enduring relationship between music and AI – evident in the influence of cybernetics on music, in Marvin Minsky’s work at MIT, and recently in the burgeoning field of Music Information Retrieval. Speakers will probe the risks and opportunities associated with music recommendation algorithms, automated genre mapping tools, emotion recognition systems, and machine learning-based creative tools. Issues are likely to include automating musical creativity, biases in recommendation algorithms, the long-term cultural effects of AI in music, and the desirability of transparency and accountability. If, as Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler put it, ‘the new gold rush in the context of AI is to enclose different fields of human knowing, feeling and action, in order to capture and privatize those fields’, then how is music inflected by these imperatives, what might be done to alter them, and what musical futures will result?

I wanted to announce you the release of our association’s new publication, articulated as a multidisciplinary collection of essays on Benga music, a Kenyan music genre, and various questions related to its current modern-day re-interpretation in the digital era. Edited in English and French, the publication includes essays by Scholars and artists such as:

I am very pleased to announce the launch of the 21st Century Music Practice series of Elements by Cambridge University Press. Elements are a new publishing format that CUP are promoting that consists of a 20,000 word text – somewhere in between a standard journal article and a book – and which can also involve extensive multi-media content. The series has developed out of the 21st Century Music Practice Research Network which currently has around 250 members in 30 countries and is dedicated to the study of what Christopher Small termed Musicking – the process of making and sharing music rather than the output itself. Obviously this exists at the intersection of ethnomusicology, performance studies, and practice pedagogy / practice-led-research in composition, performance, recording, production, musical theatre, music for screen and other forms of multi-media musicking. The generic nature of the term ‘21st Century Music Practice’ reflects the aim of the series to bring together all forms of music into a larger discussion of current practice and to provide a platform for research about any musical tradition or style. It embraces everything from hip hop to historically informed performance and K-Pop to Inuk Throat Singing.Continue reading →

Together with a few colleagues at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and beyond, I have drafted a COST Action proposal, which has recently be granted. COST Action is meant to build up and maintain a network of researchers, living and working in the EU, regarding a specific research area. The COST Action I’m part of is about Cultural Victimology.Continue reading →